Death throes

^My Life Without Me~ Directed by Isabel Coixet Death comes knocking like any other strange salesman. Unfamiliar and persistent, he stands resolutely at your door, intractable and confident in his wares. There’s no choice but to cave and buy. Some are quickly resigned and pay full price, and others will haggle for their last sunset. Ann (Sarah Polley), the 23-year-old wife and mother of Isabel Coixet’s ^My Life Without Me~ is informed she has months to live. She’s shocked, face crumpling for a moment, and then she asks her doctor for some sort of candy to suck on. In the time it takes to suck that candy to a sliver, Ann has reconciled herself to dying. She returns to her trailer, parked behind her mother’s (Deborah Harry) house, and holds her tongue. It’s anemia that keeps her pale, she explains, anemia that has her doubled up in pain over the industrial floor-polisher she uses as a night janitor. She scribbles a list of “Things To Do Before I Die.” She wants a lover and she wants to find her husband a new wife. Next to the other itemized activities of “Get false nails” and “Do something with my hair,” these are terribly ambitious objectives. But a beautiful nurse, also named Ann – as her replacement should be – moves in right next door. And even more fortuitously, the brooding surveyor Lee (Mark Ruffalo) is waiting, to be immediately enamoured, in the wings of Ann’s local laundromat. The waning girl has a harder time getting a haircut. Believing in such fortune of the unfortunate is a challenge, and other implausibilities rifle through this film, even as it aesthetically guns for dingy realism. Ann’s trailer looks authentic enough, the laundromat appropriately lit by fluorescence and strewn with vinyl chairs, the northwest sky shot as consistently overcast. Yet, Deborah Harry’s bone structure will always recall New York in the ’80s, and never a muddy front yard oozing on the outskirts of Vancouver. As the protagonist, Sarah Polley’s Ann is more a full-time babysitter than mother, always good humored, always in the mood for teasing and hugs and spilled food. And good humoured even when a flash of white finally bears her away. ^Barbarian Invasions~ Directed by Denys Arcand In Denys Arcand’s ^The Barbarian Invasions~, another cancer-dictated fate is being realized in Montreal. Rémy (Rémy Girard) is hospitalized and playing court to his assorted friends, former mistresses, ex-wife and prodigal son. This is the return of the insatiable history professor from Arcand’s Decline of ^The American Empire~ (1986), a man who indulges in all things. Thirteen years have passed, and Rémy is still didactic and impassioned, but now also panicked at the ultimate Mongol Horde hammering at his gate. This death, he stresses, is “The end of Me.” Sébastien (Stéphane Rousseau), Rémy’s financier son, flies in from London, and plunders his billfold to make his father more comfortable. This includes paying for a stash of heroin to alleviate Rémy’s pain. The heroin is supplied and administered by Nathalie (Marie-Josée Croze), an addict herself, and the most composed, fresh-faced junkie the screen has ever seen. Croze won this year’s Best Actress award at Cannes for her portrayal of someone who plucks her life back while watching someone else surrender his own. Rémy opts for a heroin overdose after a last hurrah at a friend’s cottage, completing his own timeline. Freed from the dim recesses of the hospital ward, breathing the damp lakeside air, Rémy clutches each loved one to say goodbye. Unlike Ann, he refuses to shuffle off quietly, and unlike Ann, he doesn’t want a scrap of himself unknown.